Hard Life

“There Will Be Blood,” “Juno,” “The Kite Runner.”

Early in “There Will Be Blood,” an enthralling and powerfully eccentric American epic (opening on December 26th), Daniel Plainview climbs down a ladder at his small silver mine. A rung breaks, and Daniel (Daniel Day-Lewis) falls to the base of the shaft and smashes his leg. He’s filthy, miserable, gasping for breath and life. The year is 1898. Two and a half hours later (and more than thirty years later in the time span of the film), he’s on the floor again, this time sitting on a polished bowling lane in the basement of an enormous mansion that he has built on the Pacific Coast. Having abandoned silver mining for oil, Daniel has become one of the wealthiest tycoons in Southern California. Yet he’s still filthy, with dirty hands and a face that glistens from too much oil raining down on him—it looks as if oil were seeping from his pores. The experience chronicled between these two moments is as astounding in its emotional force and as haunting and mysterious as anything seen in American movies in recent years. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but after making “Magnolia” (1999) and “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002)—skillful but whimsical movies, with many whims that went nowhere—the young writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has now done work that bears comparison to the greatest achievements of Griffith and Ford. The movie is a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!,” but Anderson has taken Sinclair’s bluff, genial oilman and turned him into a demonic character who bears more than a passing resemblance to Melville’s Ahab. Stumping around on that bad leg, which was never properly set, Daniel Plainview—obsessed, brilliant, both warm-hearted and vicious—has Ahab’s egotism and command. As for Daniel Day-Lewis, his performance makes one think of Laurence Olivier at his most physically and spiritually audacious.

At the start, Daniel and a small group of workers, wildcatting for oil, give themselves entirely to their perilous labor. There isn’t a word of dialogue. Again and again, Anderson creates raptly muscular passages—men lifting, hauling, pounding, dragging, working silently in the muck and viscous slime. Yet this film is hardly the kind of glory-of-industry documentary that bored us in school. “There Will Be Blood” is about the driving force of capitalism as it both creates and destroys the future, and the film’s tone is at once elated and sickened. A dissonant, ominous electronic wail, written by the Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood, warns us of trouble ahead. Once the derricks are up, Greenwood imitates the rhythmic thud of the drill bits and pumps with bustling passages of plucked strings and pounding sticks. “Blood” has the pulse of the future in its rhythms. Like the most elegiac Western, this movie is about the vanishing American frontier. The thrown-together buildings look scraggly and unkempt, the homesteaders are modest, stubborn, and reticent, but, in their undreamed-of future, Wal-Mart is on the way. Anderson, working with the cinematographer Robert Elswit, has become a master of the long tracking shot across still, empty landscapes. The movie, which cost a relatively cheap twenty-five million dollars to make, has gravity and weight without pomp; it’s austerely magnificent, and, when violence comes—an exploding oil well, a fight—it’s staged cleanly, in open space, and not as a tumult of digital effects or a tempest in an editing room.

One of the workers holds and kisses a baby, then dies in an accident, and Daniel raises the child, whom he calls H.W. (Dillon Freasier), as his son and partner. The movie skips to 1911, when Daniel and H.W. are travelling around California in a tin lizzie, buying up land leases, at bargain rates, from ranchers and farmers who are sitting on underground oceans of gold. Daniel takes advantage of their ignorance to pay them less than they deserve, and, as he addresses a group of them, Day-Lewis’s performance comes into focus. He lowers his chin slightly, and his dark eyes dance with merriment as he speaks in coarse yet rounded tones, the syllables precisely articulated but with a lengthening of the vowels and final consonants that gives the talk a singing, almost caressing quality. It is the voice of dominating commercial logic—an American force of nature. Day-Lewis, at fifty, is lean and fit, and his scythe-like body cuts into the air as he works or stalks, head thrust out, across a field. Much of the time, he projects a wonderful gaiety, but his Daniel never strays from business. He ignores questions, reveals nothing, and masters every encounter with either charm or a threat. He has no wife, no friends, and no interests except for oil, his son, and booze. He drinks heavily, which exacerbates his natural distrust and competitiveness. Even when he’s swimming in the Pacific, he looks dangerous. In his later years, however, Daniel disintegrates, and the iconic associations shift from Ahab to Charles Foster Kane.

Upton Sinclair was a longtime socialist, yet he understood that nothing in American life was more exhilarating than entrepreneurial energy and ruthlessness. The movie retains the novel’s exuberance, but turns much darker in tone. H.W. becomes a victim of the oil rush, and Anderson drops Sinclair’s moral hero, a Communist who organizes the oil workers. Sinclair was a reformer who wanted to ameliorate the harsh effects of capitalism, but Anderson apparently reasoned that social radicalism did not—and could not—stop men like Daniel Plainview. Sinclair, the garrulous, fact-bound literalist, has been superseded by a film poet with a pessimistic, even apocalyptic, streak.

But Anderson does retain Sinclair’s portrait of an unctuous young man who thinks he has the word of God within him: Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who creates, in the oil fields, the revivalist Church of the Third Revelation. Dano, who was the silent, philosophy-reading boy in “Little Miss Sunshine,” has a tiny mouth and dead eyes. He looks like a mushroom on a long stem, and he talks with a humble piety that gives way, in church, to a strangled cry of ecstatic fervor. He’s repulsive yet electrifying. Anderson has set up a kind of allegory of American development in which two overwhelming forces—entrepreneurial capitalism and evangelism—both operate on the border of fraudulence; together, they will build Southern California, though the two men representing them are so belligerent that they fall into combat. The movie becomes an increasingly violent (and comical) struggle in which each man humiliates the other, leading to the murderous final scene, which gushes as far over the top as one of Daniel’s wells. The scene is a mistake, but I think I know why it happened. Anderson started out as an independent filmmaker, with “Hard Eight” (1996) and “Boogie Nights” (1997). In “Blood,” he has taken on central American themes and established a style of prodigious grandeur. Yet some part of him must have rebelled against canonization. The last scene is a blast of defiance—or perhaps of despair. But, like almost everything else in the movie, it’s astonishing.

Working with the director Jason Reitman (“Thank You for Smoking”), the terrific comedy writer Diablo Cody has fashioned a lovely little movie, “Juno,” told entirely from the point of view of a teen-age girl. Juno (Ellen Page), who lives in a suburb of Minneapolis, finds herself in a terrible fix—she’s pregnant at sixteen—and her reaction to her overwhelming new situation is to treat it with the same flip, pop-cult, high-school sarcasm with which she addresses everything else. She goes to the local abortion clinic but finds the place disgustingly casual (they hand out flavored condoms), and she decides to carry the baby to term. Up to this point, all that Juno does, including having sex in a chair with her friend Bleek (Michael Cera), is based on nervy impulse, and Ellen Page, a young Canadian actress, speaks rapidly and irritably, nailing Juno’s lines with easy precision. Looking for adoptive parents, Juno quickly finds what seems to be an ideal couple: the wealthy Lorings, who live in a beige-walled McMansion with furnishings out of an upscale home-decorating magazine. Mark (Jason Bateman), a fortyish composer of commercial jingles, connects with Juno’s taste in rock music and slasher movies, and his wife, the beautiful Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), badly wants to be a mom. “If I could just have the thing, and give it to you now, I totally would,” Juno tells them. She’s a shrewd girl, and very blunt, yet she’s taken in by her own gift for rude comedy, which, as we learn, masks a great deal of uncertainty. When she and Bleek fight, and the Lorings’ marriage begins to fall apart, her cool collapses into bewilderment and tears. Where are love and constancy to be found? Reitman stages Juno’s crisis with great tenderness, and enfolds it in a witty and playful formal frame: the narrative progresses through the seasons, starting in autumn, with the first three corresponding to Juno’s trimesters. The seasons are also punctuated by Kimya Dawson’s plaintively funny songs, and by passing groups of runners from Juno’s high school, including Bleek, whose golden shorts reveal his slender long legs—his best feature, according to Juno. Michael Cera enters a scene like a soft breeze. Tall and mop-haired, he’s so mild it takes us a while to realize how intelligent Bleek is, and how entirely he appreciates Juno’s humor. This couple is younger than the battling Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl in last summer’s unwanted-pregnancy comedy, “Knocked Up.” They’re not ready for roughhouse in bed or anywhere else. When they argue, they can’t conceal their dismay even as they are winging insults at each other. “Juno” is a coming-of-age movie made with idiosyncratic charm and not a single false note.

Shame is the driving emotion in “The Kite Runner,” Marc Forster’s sturdy movie based on Khaled Hosseini’s international best-seller. As a child in Kabul, in the late nineteen-seventies, Amir, whose family was wealthy, grew up side by side with Hassan, the son of his father’s servant. Hassan was a devoted, even adoring, friend, but Amir, a physical coward, did not protect him against brutal violation in a Kabul alley. Having emigrated to Northern California, Amir (Khalid Abdalla) carries this and subsequent betrayals of Hassan inside his soul, but, in 2000, he’s given a chance at redemption—a possible rescue operation that requires him to go back to Afghanistan, now dominated by the Taliban. Shame is rarely an active emotion, and that may account, in part, for the movie’s slight stiffness and hesitancy; the dangers of staging a rape scene with children may have been inhibiting as well. One wants the actors to cut loose, but young Khalid Abdalla is forced to stand around looking stricken most of the time, and the director, a Swiss-German, worked with some of the actors through translators, which slowed the tempo and killed colloquial ease—the dialogue is well written, but there’s dead air around the lines. The best things in “The Kite Runner” are the portrait of Kabul’s flourishing upper-class life before the Soviets and then the Taliban took over, and the depiction of the bleak hypocrisies of the Taliban period—the disgusting cruelties performed in the name of righteousness, and the madness that makes it an offense to look at a woman’s face but acceptable to keep a young boy as a sex slave. The movie’s heart is certainly in the right place—it’s a quietly outraged work—but I wish there were more excitement in it from moment to moment. ♦